Danish Cheese Loaf

This charming item was a gift from someone who knows my favourite kind of  vintage cookbook are those which contain both horrors for me to laugh at and things that might be OK to actually try and cook.

I’m not an expert in Danish dairy, but luckily that canyon has been bridged, by this handy-dandy guide to the cheeses of Denmark. What more could a girl want?

And I wasn’t joking about the range of recipes, either:

This is normal

This is not.

So what to choose?  When I realised ingredient list was basically a salad held together with dough (Walnuts! Blue cheese! Celery!), I knew I had to try it.

 

 

As I didn’t have any self-raising flour at home, I used plain and added some extra baking powder, but then fretted that I hadn’t added quite enough, also the dough felt rather heavy. I decided not to risk creating a flour-fat-seed brick and formed it into a round, flat loaf on a baking tray.

I also forgot about the celery – probably for the best.

Results
I enjoyed the amount of bits in this loaf greatly and would consider the proportions suitable for experimenting with any type of nut and crumble-able cheese. The black sesame seeds were overkill however, rendering the whole thing a bit fibrous and worthy.

If, like me, you have a mild fear of yeast, this is a fine recipe to keep in your arsenal.

Loafed by Elly

Garbanzo snacks

This recipe comes from a vintage classic, Diet for a Small Planet (1971, Frances Moore-Lappé). This book, joint published by Friends of the Earth and Ballentine, is one of the first which pulls together environmentalism and nutrition, and has become short-hand for a certain kind of eating associated with the 1970s – all brown and fibrous, all the time.

The theory behind this book is that combining certain vegetables proteins gives equivalent nutrition to eating meat (more about that here). Various substances not normally found in my kitchen make frequent appearances in this book: skimmed milk powder, brewer’s yeast, soy flour. The recipes are grouped into protein matches, some of which sound more appetising than others: rice and yeast, peanuts and sunflower seeds, potatoes and milk.

Spinach

Yes, the recipe is just called ‘Spinach’. Can you guess what it is? Well done, it’s spinach. I had this with the Shoyu Fried Chicken. It’s from Japanese Food and Cooking by Stuart Griffin (1963), a book which opens with the lines ‘Before Mrs American Housewife docked at Yokohama or landed at Haneda, her husband Mr. American had scoured the Japanese scene, gastronomically’ and goes on to lay out a number of imaginary situations where Mrs American Housewife is gradually and subtly eased by Mr American into giving the weird native food a try (and eventually being converted to the point of penning this recipe book with Mr American). Here we find Mrs American being served some rice:

‘Yoshie or Michiko slaps down a big white mound besides the peas and the carrots, in the home-fry’s shadow, next to the bread and butter. “Starch!” gasps Mrs American Housewife in a stricken voice, but yields’.

Steamed Aubergines with Sesame Seeds

This is from a Golden Cooking Card book called Japanese Cooking. It’s from 1968. I also have one for Hawaiian Cooking, but so far everything I’ve looked at in there needs taro leaves and Nisa doesn’t do them.  I wasn’t sure whether I could blog this recipe – I did it somewhat ad hoc, being in need of a vegetable side, and having most of the ingredients to hand. I did omit the monosodium glutamate as that’s really not something I have. Reckon I might get some though, for future recipes from this book.

Kyuurimomi – Japanese cucumber salad

From Rosalie Swedlin’s World of Salads, 1980, Book Club Associates. (picture will come – promise)!

The intro starts with “I have always been fascinated by salads”. And at that point I put the book down. For about two years. On a scale of “it was a dark and stormy night” to 10, that rates a miserable squib of a starter. But now I’m older, and wiser, and OK – I’ve been eating crap for the past weeks, and it’s summer. Perhaps it’s time for me to be… fascinated by salad too? Or at least have good intentions before you find me face down in a Tuc cheese sandwich coma next week…